What is rock and roll and where does it come from? In this adventurous new study of music, literature, and culture, Perry Meisel shows how rock and roll joins Romanticism and blues tradition by focusing on the preoccupation with boundaries that are common to both - the boundaries between freedom and irony, country and city, cowboy and dandy. In the process, Meisel shows how the presumable difference between "high" and "mass" or "pop" culture disappears when both turn out to have similar structures.

He also reveals how canons emerge inevitably within all traditions rather than being imposed upon them from without. The Cowboy and the Dandy offers a potent synthesis of the cultural collisions and explosive incongruities integral to American art and identity. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of rock music and Romanticism, and a treat for general readers interested in popular music and culture.